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Sometimes, the smallest things can make the biggest difference. I’m currently working as a developer, helping to implement a web-based case management system. When I first started, during some of our meetings, the end users were talking about some of their frustrations with the system. One of the things that bothered them was that when you performed a search, you had to click the Search button; you couldn’t just simply hit the Enter key.

Their biggest gripe was that to find a client, you had to search for them, using the Search page. It seems like a small inconvenience, but their reasoning was that when using other search resources (Google, Bing, Yahoo), you just simply typed in a term and hit Enter. On top of that, some of them were searching dozens of times a day. They had brought it up with the previous developer, but he simply told them, “Sorry, it can’t be done.”

Well, I went back to my desk and did a little investigation. It was actually a pretty straightforward form, so there didn’t appear to be any reason that I couldn’t add that functionality in. I went out to the Interwebs and found some sample javascript code that watches for the Enter key to be pressed, then performs some function. I modified it to meet my needs and added it to the Search page. As soon as I did, I started receiving hearty thank yous from all kinds of people. Turns out that there were a lot more frustrated users out there than I knew.

To this day, people still comment on little things that they’d like to see fixed, “like the Enter key”.

Like I said, sometimes the smallest things make the biggest difference.